My Lucky Number

We read recently that 7 is the lucky number for Her highness Samantha Verant who blogs at Life, Love and Living in France.  Visit her Valentine's Day post and find out the interesting and romantic story behind it.

My lucky number is seven too, if you consider 2+5 = 7. Or it can simply be 25. But the story behind it is completely different to that of Samantha's.


Once upon a time, before the era of internet and mobile phones there was a competition. It was sponsored by Berger Paints and Her World, a family magazine in the stable of The New Straits Times, then the best selling daily newspaper in the country to commemorate the paint company's and the publications' 25th anniversary. It was aptly entitled "Anything 25".

Participants were required to write in their stories using the number 25. For example you may have been married for twenty five years, or have 25 grandchildren, or 25 pet cats, etc - something, anything, around the number 25.

As there was really nothing much to do after work those days (no blog to write or read) I submitted an entry - a simple one: My two boys and I share the same birth date. The three of us were born on the 25th of the month. It so happened too that that year Grandma was 25 years old. So the number 25 was rather special for us.

The entry caught the eye and imagination of the judges, and we won! Prizes included a trip to Club Med (which was a craze then), 25 litres of Berger paint, and 25 free monthly issues of Her World Magazine. Not bad for a simple thought and a couple of sentences.

One of the conditions attached was that as winners we agree to an interview to be published in the magazine and the local daily. The publication sent their reporter and writer Marina Mahathir (now Datuk Paduka) to our home for the interview (if the name sounds familiar she is the daughter of our then Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad. Marina is well-known as a social activist and  for her charity work in Malaysia and other countries. She is an active blogger too. Read her musings and rants on a variety of topics here).

As I was away overseas for a management course Marina interviewed the boys and Grandma at our home. I received a newspaper cutting of it by snail mail a couple of weeks later. I had kept the cutting in our almost antique photo album. As we had not entered the digital age then that was the only way to archive such memories.